This is quite an exciting day, because today I am introducing the first episode of our podcast, Audio Stage.

A few months ago (not very long), I met Fleur Kilpatrick, who I thought was absolutely superlovely, and passionate about theatre in a way that felt very familiar, with a kind of passion and curiosity and zest and just all-round inquisitiveness that I loved. And so I asked if she wanted to do a podcast together.

Fleur answered: “I’ve always wanted to do a podcast.”

Which was great, because I felt the same way. So, very quickly, we found our producer, Kieran Ruffles, and before we knew it we were making a podcast. From Fleur’s experiences interviewing theatre practitioners, and my experience teaching at the VCA, we arrived at the idea of discussing certain topics around theatre and performance in as much depth as we possibly could muster. We thought: let’s do the opposite of the three-minute soundbyte promoting a show; let’s do a really long talk about a serious question. We were as self-consciously ambitious as DIY allows.

It has turned into a great experience, and I hope you will enjoy these conversations, of which there are many more to come. In the first block, we have opted for the question of historical memory and documentation, in many ways the first and basic question in the performing arts: how do we document and remember our fleeting, fleeting art, how do we forget it, and what art do we then make, from this place of remembrance or forgetting? Our guests have all been amazing, and we continue to have enormous amounts of fun.

“I don’t know that I’m convinced of the permanence of my work – which is a bit to do with the community, and how it works: what gets put on, what gets remembered and, critically, what gets printed, what gets published. Another reason why the New Wave, the 60s’ and 70s’ generation is so remembered and so written about is because they published friggin’ everything! If you’re going to go find a play, it’s going to be from one of those guys. Unless you pick up one of the Currency House programs, and even those are mostly those guys. And I say ‘guys’ because they are mostly guys, too.”
– Robert Reid

In the first episode, our guest is extraordinary Robert Reid, playwright, director, director of Pop-Up Playground and great populariser of performative play in Australia, and a PhD candidate in theatre history.

Discussed in this episode:
melodrama, vaginal knitting, “The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,” stage directions: yes or no?, improbable character descriptions, and the potential historical value of internet comments.

New episodes will be released every 2 weeks, and we have made quite an effort to make them as accessible as possible, on a variety of platforms. Stay tuned and enjoy!

About

Just like, according to Debussy, music is the space between the notes, so is meaning the space between the signs. Here on Guerrilla Semiotics you will find notes and counter-notes on words, images, sounds and space, and what the mind makes of it all, regardless of whether it is theatre, dance, film, graphic novel, or a city that we are talking about.